Remaining Native

Bluesky

Ku Stevens is a runner. It’s what he loves, it’s what he’s good at, and he dreams of making a career of it. But doing that would require getting a scholarship to the University of Oregon, and that’s not easy for a Paiute kid from the rez. He knows he’ll have to work twice as hard as others. In doing so, he has a role model whose legacy both inspires and intimidates him: his own great grandfather, Frank Quinn, who ran 50 miles in order to get home from a state boarding school when he was just eight years old.

If boarding schools and running away sound like jolly japes, you probably don’t know much about the history of Native people in the Americas. Frank Quinn, like countless others, was forcibly taken from his family and placed in the institution with the intention of ‘reforming’ him – that is, erasing as much as possible of the culture he grew up with and training him to act like a white person. Many children died in such schools. Violent beatings and other forms of abuse were commonplace. In this documentary, which screened at South By Southwest, Paige Bethmann incorporates a sequence of archive images – ones that no doubt made their commissioners proud – of classes full of children who look more and more like white kids, more and more like identical factory products. Later, she presents a stunning panoramic image of such children seated in rows that seem to stretch on forever until, finally, they give way to a group of teenagers in military uniforms, their processing complete.

Only 17 at the start of the film, Ku has but a cursory knowledge of these things, and the journey we watch him make involves not only his development as an athlete but also his deepening engagement with his culture and its history, especially that personal aspect of it. It’s sad to see him, at that tender age, worrying that he hasn’t done enough with his life, but that’s a first step towards discovering and exercising his own power, which might in turn give his community new hope.

Haudenosaunee herself, Bethmann understands the situation well, but her closeness to the teenager and the personal character that the film takes on as a result is something else. Equally important is the landscape, the wide Nevada plains and hills where he and his grandfather ran. back then, he reflects, this land would have been thick with sagebrush. Its desolations mirrors what has happened to his people, the more pertinent because of their spiritual connection to the land, but the knowledge of how to restore it is not yet lost to them, and an increase in prosperity could make all the difference. As much as it delves into the past, this is also a film about the future.

Although Native film is beginning to bloom, there’s still too little of it out there, and the optimism in this film is rare and valuable. With impressive editing, it tells its story well and will fascinate those new to the subject, whilst the growing connection between its young subject and a man he can only recall from childhood will move viewers of all backgrounds. It’s a powerful coming-of-age story, and whether or not it is successful, of Ku is, it seems to herald a renaissance.